Tag Archives: Growth

Seedlings

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First Broccoli Seedlings Emerging For My 2021 Garden

I rejoiced to see you emerge from the fecund and spongy soil

Where your seed was carefully wrapped in the warm earth

The vessel where you begin your short life is small and light

To bring you to a safe space and protect you from the killing frost

So, you can have enough time to fully develop and bear fruit

Before the brutal summer sun saps your strength and dries your roots

Yet your life will not transpire in these carefully controlled conditions

To reach your full size you must grow beyond the confines of this pot

Eventually, you will be transplanted into a place prepared in the garden

Where the sun shines, the rain falls, the wind blows, and the soil is deep

To sink your roots deep in during the hot days and the chilling nights

As I add water or perhaps cover you in the event of a late spring freeze

But as you grow, you need my protection less as your roots drive deep

It is in the garden with worms and weeds where the flowers and fruit mature

As I think on your short life from seed to sprout to fruit

Started in winter, growing in spring and gone in the summer

I ponder the balance between sheltering and smothering

The necessity of providing a safety from the life destroying frost

Is as essential as letting things grow in the uncomfortable world

Knowing what supports the seedlings struggle to reach fruition

And what prevents their growth beyond the vessels they start in

Growing a Story

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By FASTILY (TALK) – I created this work entirely by myself., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6850324

Growing a Story

Some kernel of truth was planted in the fecund imagination
And as the new shoot broke from the warm moist ground
Spreading its initial leaves to breath in the air in a new world
As an alien sun showers the cotyledons of the seed with radiation
And the roots begin to drive into the soil feeding on the detritus
So many things can happen to this new seedling over its maturation
The environment it emerges into may be too toxic for it to endure
Animals and insects may eagerly devour its first green leaves
Or weeds may grow up around it choking its access to the sun
Drought may deny it the nourishment it needs or flood may overwhelm
Subterranean pests or diseases may devour the roots it sinks
But sometimes, against all the odds, the roots delve deep
The plant spreads its tender branches towards the heavens
And the story slowly grows, struggling to reach maturity
Putting forth leaves, flower and fruit and delighting the eye
Yet no story grows unchanged by the world it enters
The knots and gnarls that give it character as it grows
Some branches have to be pruned carefully by its author
As it takes its place among the orchard that invites the hungry
To walk among the collected trees and to taste the fruit
Which provides the seeds for the next generation of stories

New Growth

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Vincent Van Gogh, Tree Roots, (1890)

 

Water washes away the sins of the night, pushing them downward to the gutters
Running back through the storm sewers and into the rivers and eventually into the sea
Where they sink down, deeper and deeper, into the abyss where no light shines
Blood is thicker than water, so in the deluge of the summer monsoon it sinks
As the rain washes away the chains that bind and the relations which smother
Allowing the newly baptized child to walk through the renewing waters as a new thing

Perhaps the blood will wash deep into the earth, passing on its life to the fecund ground
Reaching down towards hell with its roots, or perhaps rising towards heaven in the trees
Or perhaps doing both at once connecting the hell of the past and the reborn hope
Forming a perpetual reminder of the journey from darkness to light, from seed to sapling
That even new growth comes from the ground fertilized by the struggles we lived through
That only the killing frost of winter can prepare the earth for the new growth of spring

Death and life, bound together like the elements of ground and air and water and fire
Dying and rising, sin and salvation, blood, breath, water, new hope and long departed dreams
The past may no longer be seen, may have washed away in the rain and still it remains
Flowing through our veins, the blood of our forefathers and the sweat of our children
The earth gives its silent testimony of the blood it has ingested and the tears it drank
In the flowers, leaves and grass which cover it like a blanket, its bright quilt of resurrection